Can you introduce yourself

I go by Allusian, and I have served as a Core Contributor at ADAO since October of ‘21, after listening into spaces its earliest founder hosted and frequented in the community in the wake of the Goguen era. My main focus has been on the upkeep and design of the Discord server, onboarding new members, writing and editing documents, articles, and outreach via social media, as well as scheduling and organizing guest speakers for ADAO’s educational “Roundtable” Twitter spaces hosted every Saturday.

Thomas DiMatteo is a community organizer, crypto researcher, entrepreneur, and front-end developer, with a keen interest in decentralized finance and governance on Cardano and other blockchain ecosystems. He has six years of experience as a small business owner serving customers throughout the state of Florida, several years as an investor in blockchains, and a participant in decentralized finance and autonomous protocols.

Hey guys, happy to connect today and learn more about ADAO. Can you tell us more about the mission of ADAO and how you are trying to achieve it?

ADAO’s mission is to build open-source tools, educational and supportive resources to empower robust, decentralized systems of collaboration and governance, starting with Cardano. We are achieving this by attracting talent from various disciplines and walks of life who share our passion for building systems that enable, empower and facilitate new ways of organizing. Some of ADAO’s major contributions to the ecosystem include the RoundTable multi-signature Wallet DApp, the ADAO Staking Portal, and the Agora Protocol, which we have partnered with Liqwid Labs to develop.

What are the most important things about ADAO?

Our community is our most important asset. Without their passion and contributions of time, energy, and resources, ADAO would not have gotten far. Everything – our name, logos, Discord server, website, Medium articles, social media presence, and open-source repositories are all possible thanks to the community that rallied around the idea of doing our part to facilitate decentralization.

Why did you choose to build on Cardano?

Cardano’s scientific approach to solving complex issues in the blockchain space lays a strong foundation upon which new, secure, and robust systems can be built with wide-scale adoption in mind. Thanks to this approach, along with the advantage of hindsight, Cardano has been able to inherently solve many of the hurdles blockchain protocols and organizations face today. The community is visionary, astute, welcoming, discerning, and eager to build.

Going forward, how will ADAO make an impact in the crypto space or on the world?

We hope that, through catalyzing the proliferation of DAOs, ADAO will play a leading role in the explosive growth in the adoption of blockchain technologies. People around the globe are disillusioned by antiquated systems prone to corruption and inefficiency. Blockchain technologies enable sensible solutions that stand to markedly improve countless facets of life, from commerce, finance, and government, to running or working within a business.

Now, what are your accomplishments so far, and what are you most proud of?

There are too many accomplishments, large and small, to list, but we are especially proud of the RoundTable DApp, which has seen wide adoption in the community, from advanced protocol DAOs to small groups of friends pooling ada to bid on art. One community group even uses RoundTable to donate to animal shelters!

We’ve also built a Staking Portal DApp that enables organizations to incentivize their tokenholders and saw two proposals approved by Catalyst voters. The first helped us to compensate our RoundTable Developers, and the second funded further open-source development, as well as the establishment of the ADAO Foundation in Liechtenstein (currently underway).

Our proudest accomplishment would have to be the strong and growing community we’ve built at ADAO. Members come from across the globe, from diverse walks of life, all united by a passion for lending a hand to the community and tool-building necessary to enable decentralization on a global scale. Every member brings their unique story, talents and skillset, and breathes life into the DAO.

Why is open source a key principle of ADAO?

Open source software promotes accessibility, security, and a spirit of collaborative innovation. We find these aspects important for growing the ecosystem and fostering a culture of transparency and community necessary for building the infrastructure of a blockchain future. Open source development is critical when it comes to interoperability between protocols. In the early days of a new and growing ecosystem, open source projects and standards allow distributed groups to design their protocols in a synergistic and interoperable way. Without open source resources, we quickly see information and design silos, where protocols and organizations, although operating on the same blockchain, cannot interact with each other.

What is the future of ADAO? For example, what new things are to come, and what will it mean for the overall project?

ADAO has amassed close to 40 open-source repositories, including advanced on-chain governance frameworks, Plutus contracts for non-custodial token distribution, NFT minting, staking systems, and more. Even non-technical resources like the ADAO constitution and other templated documents are open-sourced and being leveraged by other Cardano-based organizations. ADAO plans to continue this mission of providing free open-source resources and making them even more accessible through strategic partnerships and novel contribution incentives.

Which partnerships have you engaged so far, and which ones are the most impactful?

The most notable and strategic partnership to date would be the collaboration with The Summon Platform. Summon, is a multi-entity ecosystem and infrastructure provider. The Summon ecosystem as of now includes the Summon Association, Summon Labs LLC, and the Summon Platform DAO. Together these groups are able to leverage advanced, open-source systems and make them more user-friendly through a no-code interface and suite of APIs. Summon continues to directly contribute to the work of ADAO and other open-source communities, building new and expanding upon existing code repositories while providing the commercial-grade infrastructure that enables easy access and integration into the various tools and modules built by Summon. By leveraging the Summon Platform, projects can deploy or simply “plug in” to all the tools Cardano has to offer with a simple, no-code solution. This includes token minting/generation, non-custodial token sale/distribution, smart contract-based staking systems, on and off-chain token voting, Native and Plutus script treasuries, access to advanced DeFi yield strategies, and much more.

How can someone interested in ADAO find out more about it?

The best way to stay up to date on everything ADAO is doing is to follow the @ADAOcommunity on Twitter. If you would like to get involved or want to get a deeper look at everything going on in ADAO, please join the community Discord server. We hold General Meetings at 1 A.M. UTC every Thursday and 3 P.M. UTC every Saturday. Projects looking to leverage or contribute to ADAO’s open-source repositories can visit the ADAOcommunity GitHub. Projects looking to leverage Summon Platform modules and infrastructure can reach out to us on Twitter, join the Summon DAO Discord server, or reach out directly to the core team at team@summonplatform.io.

What is your role in the company?

My name is Ashish Prajapati, and I'm one of the co-founders of strica.io, a Cardano blockchain-focused development company.

Hey Ashish! Happy to connect today and learn more about Strica! Can you tell us more about the project and the problem you were addressing?

We are building products that enhance user experience using Cardano and enhance developer experience building on Cardano. Cardanoscan and Typhon Wallet are our well-known projects, and an upcoming project flac.finance is focused on processing payments and is being built on Cardano.

What are the most important things about Strica?

Strica is doing lots of open source work to grow the Cardano ecosystem StricaHQ. We have developed and open-sourced a full suite Cardano wallet library in pure javascript and Cardano key pair generation library in pure javascript. These libraries are used by Ledger and many marketplaces for building Cardano transactions in the browser. We have also developed a fully in-house CBORS package to serialize and deserialize the CBOR data types, focusing on working with Cardano data types.

We are working on more open source tools and packages to contribute to the Cardano ecosystem.

Now, what are your accomplishments so far, and what are you most proud of?

Strica is proud to have developed a fully js-based Cardano wallet library from scratch. The library is used by Typhon Wallet, Ledger Live, Minswap, and many more projects to build and sign Cardano transactions. This was achieved by building more core-level components in javascript. I would love everyone to check out our GitHub and explore our open-source tools.

Recently we have worked on the Ledger Live integration of Cardano, one of the most requested features in the entire Cardano ecosystem.

We are also working on upgrading Cardanoscan explorer to make it easy for new users to view and understand Cardano UTXO transactions and enhance the user experience. It will be a big release around the Vasil hard fork.

Why should people use Typhon Wallet and Cardanoscan? What are the advantages over other wallets and blockchain explorers?

Our goal behind Typhon Wallet and Cardanoscan is to provide the full feature sets possible on Cardano and provide the best user experience by utilizing the power of the Cardano blockchain.

With that in mind, Typhon Wallet has unique, essential features in a very user-friendly design. One such feature we released recently is to be able to send ada to multiple different addresses with a single transaction by harnessing the power of UTXO. Many companies now use this to process salaries, for example. Typhon also allows attaching arbitrary metadata to a transaction and adding any number of tokens to a transaction.

Typhon Wallet also supports transaction chaining. Users can submit as many transactions as possible without waiting for the previous transactions to get confirmed until they have enough ada balance.

Cardanoscan also follows the same philosophy of maximum features in user-friendly designs. Cardanoscan is now mainly used by the Cardano community for their daily analytics requirements and to view transactions on the chain. We are also releasing a big re-designed version of Cardanoscan around the time of the Vasil hard fork. We hope to make it easy for new Cardano users to view and understand Cardano transactions.

What does the future look like for Strica? For example, what new things are to come, and what will it mean for the overall project?

Strica is focused on building solutions on and around the Cardano blockchain. With our fleet of two live projects, one upcoming project flac.finance, and our continued contribution to the open source Cardano tools and libraries, we are staying strong and building even during the crypto winter. This is our second crypto winter. Strica also explores opportunities to build enterprise solutions on Cardano for enterprise clients.

Which partnerships have you engaged in so far, and which ones are the most impactful?

Strica has been working closely with many projects in the ecosystem, and some partnerships are officially announced, while for others, we continue to work with and help grow each other.

We are closely working together with,

• Cardano Guild members
• Minswap
• jpg.store
• Tokhun

and many dApps and marketplace platforms in the ecosystem.

Tell us about your team. Who are the people behind Strica?

Strica core team:

• Ashish Prajapati
• Mehul Prajapati
• Pavan Vora
• Prashanth Soordelu

Can you introduce yourselves?

We’re a group of long-term Cardano enthusiasts with a mix of different backgrounds that has been contributing via Guild-operators (widely known in Dev - and especially SPO community - you may have heard of CNTools, gLiveView, the short 1-epoch community-owned Guild Network, topology Updater, etc) - we have been making immense contributions to the ecosystem without any additional marketing or financial cost requests. I’d say each one of us, while having different opinions/expertise, are firm believers in Open Source frameworks (which often get mixed with hosting code publicly) and decentralisation.

While we do not believe to be restricted to a small group (and hope it extends further via community engagement), to list out the initial core members:

• Damjan
• Homer
• Markus
• Michael
• Ola
• RdLrT

Hey guys, happy to connect today and learn more about Koios! Can you tell us more about the project and the problem you were addressing?

Koios is best described as a decentralized and elastic RESTful query layer for exploring data on the Cardano blockchain to consume within wallets, explorers, and other applications. As the size of the Cardano blockchain rapidly grows, maintenance of Cardano components becomes increasingly expensive for builders leading to a few centralised API providers. That’s why we started Koios, to create an open-source and decentralised query layer that every builder in the community can use and improve instead of relying on centralised entities. The primary differentiator for Koios is it can be run in light mode (as a remote consumer) or you can run an exact replica of the network locally while stringing it into a cluster.

Besides, we are planning to reward each of the nodes contributing in the growth and development of Koios network throughout the deployment of a L1 Cardano side-chain which will bring more value points in the ecosystem. In particular we will be able to:

• Reward nodes and contributors
• Develop a blockchain bridged with the Cardano blockchain natively
• Offer a brand new playground for developers who believes in Koios and Cardano
• Deploy a self-sustainable ecosystem which will support Cardano API services in a decentralised way indefinitely

It is a network of connected Koios nodes that are each able to serve requests with automatic failover to healthy nodes in case of any errors which increases the security and scalability of the network itself.

What are the most important things about Koios?

The main things about Koios are its robustness, flexibility and openness. The robustness comes from having no single point of failure - when you query data from Koios, you are not querying a single server but a network of servers which talk to each other and are maintained by separate entities/contributors which defines our decentralisation characteristic.

Koios is also very flexible, both in terms of existing API functionalities, which can be made very specific to particular use-cases, and in terms of further feature extensions. As the entire project is open-sourced, it becomes stronger with growing community participation and more and more ideas are realised thanks to our API infrastructure.

Now, what are your accomplishments so far, and what are you most proud of?

Our most important accomplishment so far was the release of the initial Koios API v1 in March 2022, with complete information for Cardano blockchain as per feedback from existing products. Since then, the usage of the public Koios API has skyrocketed and now Koios nodes have been serving more than three billion requests monthly from > 2500 unique IPs (excluding crawlers). More importantly, individuals have come forward to not only participate as instance providers but also build Open-Source libraries and Tools helping out with adoption. We are very proud of that as it shows that other community members share our vision and that helps us move forward together.

Why should people choose to use Koios? What are the advantages over other existing API providers?

We believe different solutions will have their specific use-cases that will definitely fit a subsection of the developer community better. The differentiators for Koios are:

• The entire project has been built with transparency and community engagement.

• The decentralised cluster of instances currently provides a good balance of providing independent data, while still going through health checks from monitoring layers. These monitoring layers are easily replaceable as well, with the flexibility to split and create separate smaller/larger clusters with relevant features. This is already being done by some of the NFT projects currently.

• The elasticity ensures that we’re not reliant on a single entity to manage infrastructure, and anyone can run the instance individually or join the cluster, with the failover support built-in from the template - it already reduces individual clustering costs.

• There is enough flexibility in the design to use partial components in light-mode, and also keep services extensible. For instance, if/when there are enough advantages, we could easily integrate Ogmios/Scrolls or any other tools that help out in providing data. if something isn't easily available.

• One of the focus areas that we still aim to magnify in coming months is standardisation and object representation - as a developer one should not have to invent what an object representation means, or have to ask why different explorers represent an object differently. We hope to fill this gap further soon.

What is the future of Koios? For example, what new things are to come, and what will it mean for the overall project?

At the moment, we have a couple of things going on. We recently submitted two Project Catalyst proposals which are being assessed. One of the proposals introduces an incentive mechanism for Koios node operators along with the first Koios DApp based on chain analysis. The other project will extend the existing Koios API with a utilities microservice for handling data post-consumption, as well as introduce Koios bots that will serve community needs in social channels.

Which partnerships have you engaged in so far, and which ones are the most impactful?

We do not have specific partnerships per se, but we have already good collaboration with different community members/teams, and many projects are already live now using Koios.

Nevertheless, we are optimistic about future potential partnerships that could come into play while keeping in touch with basic goals as Koios keeps growing, improving and serving the Cardano community.

Where can we learn more and keep up with the project?

Information:

Basic introduction about Koios can be found on Koios website: https://koios.rest, while the API specs can be found at https://api.koios.rest.

Releases/Code:

The various artifacts pertaining Koios Cluster can be found here while the SQL queries reside in guild-operators repository here.

Participation as Instance Provider:

Instructions for easy to set-up instance of koios can be found here.

Support/Discussions/Updates:

You can join Koios discussion groups on telegram, we also hold bi-weekly public meetings where anyone is free to join and discuss potential future changes that Koios should drive towards. There are also announcements / polls shared in this group to capture feedback regarding specifics of the API, or interim pre-release instructions.

Lastly, if you’d only like to follow important information, you can find us on twitter via @CardanoKoios.

What is your role in the company?

Hi! My name is Nicolas Arqueros. I’m one of the co-founders of dcSpark and also a core contributor to the Milkomeda Protocol.

Hey, Nicolas Arqueros, happy to connect today and learn more about the Milkomeda project! Can you tell us more about the project and the problem you were addressing?

Following Metcalfe's law, tech products primarily accrue value based on the size of their network. This means that superior technology can give a slight edge but does not in itself guarantee a definitive win against established competitors. Promising cryptocurrency projects are part of this set of tech products, thus it is necessary to achieve a critical adoption growth trajectory to come out ahead over the long term.

Milkomeda is a protocol that gives EVM capabilities to non-EVM Blockchains. In practical terms, it allows the deployment of smart contracts from Ethereum, Avalanche, Binance Smart-Chain, and multiple other chains, to chains that wouldn’t support it. Developers are at the core of making the visions of these businesses possible, and as such, having access to a large pool of developers is one of the vital points for ecosystem success.

What are the most important things about Milkomeda?

In about 4 billion years the Milky Way Galaxy and the Andromeda Galaxy will merge into a new galaxy called Milkomeda. The team is not only focused on bringing EVM compatibility and other technical advantages to developers but also to make the onboarding process of users simple and easy. Some of the most important things about Milkomeda:

• EVM compatibility

• Usage of ADA (or other tokens depending on the deployment) as their base currency adds more value to the tokens

• Creation and maintenance of critical infrastructure tooling

• Wrapped smart contracts bring a novel UX to the table for end users, wherein they will have the power to execute smart contracts on various systems without having to switch wallets or even know what is going on behind the scenes.

• Research about data availability and rollups – the goal is to deploy as a rollup or move to a rollup. Rollups are the most likely scalability technology available

• Compatibility layer for other technologies like zk-rollups to be integrated through Milkomeda

• Connection with other ecosystems using bridges that anchor to Milkomeda

• Metaverse for faster transaction confirmation

• Indirectly, Cardano-multiplatform-library (CML) for the creation and serialization of transactions

• Indirectly, CARP (Cardano Postgres Indexer) a replacement for cardano-db-sync that works at least 10x faster – required for high-performance dapps and tooling

Why did you choose to launch your project on Cardano?

Me, Seba, and Rob have been part of the Cardano community for quite a while so we know the ecosystem, the tooling, the different technologies, what’s coming up, etc. Previously, I was CTO of Emurgo and also a board member of the Cardano Foundation. We really like the community behind Cardano so we naturally want to support it.

Going forward, how will Milkomeda make an impact in the crypto space or on the world?

Milkomeda is like providing internet to stand-alone LAN networks. We are allowed to connect multiple ecosystems and help Cardano move towards one of its goals of interoperability. We are making technologies compatible between different ecosystems, and even going further, we can act as a compatibility layer for other technologies like zk-rollups.

Now, what are your accomplishments so far, and what are you most proud of?

Oof, difficult to tell. I’m mostly focused on what’s next in our roadmap. Some of the top ones that come to my mind are:

• Bridge integration with Cardano connecting it with Ethereum, Avalanche, Binance Smart-Chain, Polkadot, and Solana among other ecosystems

• Bringing stablecoins to Cardano like USDC and USDT

• Bringing other assets to Cardano that not only help DEXes on Milkomeda but also DEXes on Cardano mainnet. Some of these assets are WBTC, ETH, etc.

• First sidechain for Cardano! And also (briefly) surpassing 100M in TVL in less than a month from launch

• The hackathons and the acceleration program that are launching soon also look very promising. Thank you everyone for spreading the word

Why should people choose to use Milkomeda? What are the advantages over other Layer 2 Protocols?

Currently, Milkomeda is the only Layer 2 Protocol available in Cardano. We will see what other solutions propose in the future, but they will have to hurry up! We will continue moving forward and creating a bigger gap that they will have to close up.

Milkomeda is bringing more complex DeFi to Cardano, and also to DAOs and gaming! Even further, Milkomeda is also being used to test some concepts like djed ala Kusama for Polkadot. Another cool concept is that users that think that they have not used Milkomeda may actually have used it by getting exposure to assets that were bridged through Milkomeda.

What is the future of Milkomeda? For example, what new things are to come, and what will it mean for the overall project?

We are very excited to see what Vasil will come. In particular, we are looking forward to seeing progress in data availability in the mainchain so we can move Milkomeda to a rollup. We are also working on improving performance and continue growing the value added by Milkomeda with games and dao tooling among other projects.

We are also launching in Algorand which we are excited about. We expect that this will improve interoperability between two chains that share a culture of a future based on deep academic research.

Tell us about your team. Who are the people behind Milkomeda?

From the dcSpark side we have a few names that some people may recognize:

Me (Nicolas Arqueros, Cofounder - CEO @ dcSpark)

Former CTO @ Emurgo & Former Board member at the Cardano Foundation. Senior Software Engineer for multiple startups in Silicon Valley.

Sebastien Guillemot (Cofounder - CTO @ dcSpark)

Former VP of Engineering @ Emurgo. Former Engineer @ Microsoft. He developed the most used Cardano library in the ecosystem. Even Coinbase is using it to provide ADA support.

Robert Kornacki (Cofounder - CSO @ dcSpark)

Former Head of Research @ Emurgo. Former Board Member at the Ergo Foundation. In charge of developing the Ergo ecosystem (Oracles, dApp frameworks, and a Stablecoin).

Melissa Simmons (COO @ dcSpark)

Former COO @ p23: Created and maintained an efficient filing system for documents related to over 50 entities. Managed daily activities and maintenance for six multimillion-dollar estates.

Nicolas Di Prima (Lead Engineer @ dcSpark)

Former lead developer of Jormungandr (Cardano's first PoS implementation in Rust) @ IOHK. Developed several cryptographic components of the Cardano wallets and nodes.

Caro Rossi (CMO @ dcSpark)

Board Member @WSA. Global Mentor for Redbull. Founder Team of Startup Chile. SOSV Fellow. Coach +1,000 startups on Marketing & Biz. Dev. Lead community building n for organizations such as The World Bank to InnovaRock Media.

And over 20 more amazing team members. There are multiple organizations working on Milkomeda like Vacuum Labs and Atix Labs (part of Globant).

Which partnerships have you engaged in so far, and which ones are the most impactful?

So far, I believe that the most important ones are the bridge partnerships that have brought multiple assets to Cardano and also allowed “export” of Cardano CNT to other chains.

The partnership with SOSV for the acceleration program also has been critical.

Integrating with Milkomeda:​

To integrate with Milkomeda please visit: Milkomeda Getting Started

Some of the projects that have already been integrated are Blueshift, Milkyswap, OccamX, Nomad, Muesliswap, and BridgeC (Celer).

Milkomeda Accelerator:​

Milkomeda Accelerator, SOSV (dlab)

Link: Milkomeda Accelerator

Investors:​

Arrington Capital, Coinbase, Circle (USDC), Hypersphere, Archetype among some other great investors.

Thank you for your time! Do you have anything else to add?

The three founders of dcSpark, core contributors of Milkomeda, have supported the Cardano Ecosystem for years. If you would like to learn more about our story and reasons for dcSpark’s existence, we invite you to read this post: Building a significant imprint: A story about decentralization (dc) Spark.

For the April Spotlight Article, we interviewed Long Nguyen, the co-founder of Minswap.

Hey Long! Happy to connect today and learn more about the Minswap project! Can you tell us more about the project and the problem you were addressing?

Minswap is a community-centric decentralized exchange on Cardano. With no venture capital funding or private investment, we aim to become the best DEX for anyone to buy and sell their Cardano native tokens, and earn passive income via yield farming and staking.

Why did you choose to build Minswap on Cardano?

Cardano is simply the most decentralised Proof-of-Stake chain as of now. We are also aligned with Cardano’s philosophy of measure twice cut once, moving slowly and research-driven. Cardano also has an awesome community and that makes it the best place to launch a community-driven, no-VC projects like Minswap.

What are the most important things about Minswap?

We are a 100% community-funded project without VC investment. We have a fairly-distributed tokenomics with more than 70% going to the public. We are also one of the most innovative, builder-centric projects.

Going forward, how will Minswap make an impact in the crypto space or on the world?

Advocating for Open and Fair ecosystem initiatives like open sourcing that help growing and strengthening Cardano’s technical community, the scalability of solutions, and accessibility for future builders to deploy innovative applications.

We believe that while Cardano has emerged as the most decentralised PoS blockchain network, every effort ought to be made to maintain and advance this level of decentralisation by empowering small and medium SPOs to benefit from the emergence of DeFi in Cardano, while also enabling them to build trust and reputation.

Now, what are your accomplishments so far, and what are you most proud of?

Since Q1 2022, we have successfully launched the testnet. We launched a successful Liquidity Bootstrapping Event with Fair Price Discovery and Transparency, Equitable and Wide Distribution and No front-running by whales.

We launched our mainnet and yield farming as well. We are the biggest DEX in terms of TVL at the moment, having been funded entirely by Catalyst and our community. However, the thing that I’m most proud of is our team that has and will continue to work hard to make Minswap better, and our community that has always continued to support us over good and challenging times.

Why should people choose to use Minswap? What are the advantages over other decentralized exchanges?

We are fast! We also have one of the best UI/UX out there with many user-friendly features like mobile support, price chart, zap-in and real-time yield farming. We have more than 30 languages with community contributors in all parts of the world. We are always looking to innovate by borrowing ideas from successful DeFi concepts on other chains and applying them to Cardano, as well as using some of the features of the Cardano architecture to make DeFi special such as built-in liquid staking of ADA.

What is the future of Minswap? For example, what new things to come, and what will it mean for the overall project?

We are working hard to add more features and improve the performance, the experience and security of Minswap. The next big thing that the community can expect is MIN staking and Minswap v2.

Tell us about your team. Who are the people behind Minswap?

We are a DeFi passionate global team with members from all over the world. Most of our developers are based in Vietnam, while other members of the Team are in Europe, India and the UAE.

Which partnerships have you engaged so far, and which ones are the most impactful?

We are engaged in a lot of partnerships ranging from bridges to trading NFTs in marketplaces with MIN tokens. There are also some strategic partnerships that will benefit mostly the trading experience like integrating Djed Stablecoin that will help provide a convenient unit for transacting. In addition, Minswap will be tapping into the endless possibilities that synthetics offer by partnering with Indigo. Stay tuned for more partnerships!

Thank you for your time! Do you have anything else to add?

We are always happy if the Cardano community submits ideas, improvement proposals and feedback on our #ideas channel on Discord or on our Forum. We would also like to thank our community and the greater Cardano community for the support they have shown towards us, in the good and the hard times. It is a blessing to build in such a welcoming and active community!

For the March Spotlight Article, we interviewed , the co-founder and Cheif Operating Officer at Lovelace Academy. Lovelace Academy is a blockchain education platform to streamline your development journey with Cardano and Web3.

Hey Shweta! Happy to connect today and learn more about the Lovelace Academy platform! Can you tell us more about the platform and the problem you were addressing? Where are there gaps in the education space?

Lovelace Academy is a blockchain education platform that aims to make it easier for our learners to navigate the developer ecosystem, understand key concepts and learn best practices while building on Cardano. Currently, no platforms guide newcomers on the "Why" and "How" to build on Cardano. So we are trying to be a one-stop platform to onboard people on Cardano.

What are the most important things about Lovelace Academy?

Blockchain can be a very scary space, especially if someone is from a non-technical background and wants to learn how to code. We are proud of the simple approach to teach our users about Cardano. We are a free Cardano education platform that attracts, inspires, and educates builders and visionaries to build on top of Cardano's game-changing Smart Contracts & Native Assets Platform.

Going forward, how will Lovelace Academy make an impact in the crypto space or on the world?

Adoption of Cardano beyond speculators and early adopters can be greatly accelerated by highlighting how real-world problems can be solved using Cardano's safe, elegant and powerful platform for a wide range of industries. Our objective is to create a force of developers who will build great products on top of it.

Now, what are your accomplishments so far, and what are you most proud of?

We recently released Learn @ Lovelace Academy and got amazingly positive feedback from our users. We feel extremely proud and satisfied whenever we hear that people are using our platform and they are finding it useful. That makes all the hard work worthwhile.

Why should people choose to use Lovelace Academy? What are the advantages over other educational platforms?

Lovelace Academy is a free blockchain education platform that teaches people how to build on Cardano and focuses on why they should choose Cardano over thousands of other blockchains. It focuses on end-to-end teaching in a very basic, understandable approach to even people from non-technical backgrounds.

What is the future of Lovelace Academy? For example, what new things to come, and what will it mean for the overall platform?

Our vision is to provide certification courses for users learning via Lovelace Academy eventually. This will allow them to prove that they have the said skills.

Tell us about your team. Who are the people behind Lovelace Academy?

• Maria: Chief Executive Officer & Founder. Also operating CARDS pool.

• Keith: Co-Founder & Chief Technical Officer. Also operating SAFE pool.

• Shweta: Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer. Also operating BLOCK pool.

  
  

Thank you for your time! Do you have anything else to add?

Thank you for having Lovelace Academy on Spotlight Interview. It was a great pleasure. I want to say thank you for this amazing initiative that brings projects of Cardano to the whole community.

For the February Spotlight Article, we interviewed Shahaf, one of the founders and CEO at COTI. COTI is an enterprise-grade fintech platform that empowers organizations to build their payment solution and digitize any currency to save time and money.

Hey Shahaf! Happy to connect today and learn more about the COTI project! Can you tell us more about the project and the problem you were addressing?

Thanks for having me! In a nutshell, COTI is a financial technology company that uses the blockchain to solve traditional banking problems. COTI’s goal is to meet the challenges of both centralized and decentralized finance (DeFi) such as fees, latency, global inclusion, risk, clogging, and complexity.

COTI will solve these challenges by introducing a new type of DAG-based base protocol and infrastructure that is scalable, fast, private, inclusive, low cost, and optimized for finance.

What are the most important things about COTI?

The most important thing to know is that we are the only layer 1 solution for payments. The other layer 1’s out there are optimized for other things. And now, with Trustchain 2.0 and the upcoming MultiDAG 2.0, we are going to top our game. Right now, we have the COTI coin, but in the future, we are going to present a new token standard, issuing more tokens, some of them will be created by COTI, some of them will be created by other enterprises and merchants who want to develop on the COTI network.

Going forward, how will COTI make an impact in the crypto space or on the world?

COTI has a one-of-a-kind technology. The core of COTI’s infrastructure lies within the Trustchain. COTI is based on DAG (directed acyclic graph) data structure, which works in tandem to drive scalability, processing over 10,000 transactions per second. The Multi-DAG allows enterprises to issue their coins on the COTI Truschain protocol. The Multi-DAG is not only optimized for stable coins, but it’s optimized for all coins and tokens.

Now, what are your accomplishments so far, and what are you most proud of?

Wow, we have had so many big milestones. Where do I begin?

1. We launched our Mainnet (the Trustchain) back in 2019, now processing more than 10K TPS.

2. We developed MultiDAG, which enables issuing tokens on our infrastructure.

3. We launched the COTI bank account and debit card.

4. We just launched the COTI Treasury, an algorithmic and decentralized pool of $COTI, where users can deposit $COTI and be rewarded for their participation.

5. Our partnership with Cardano includes the following developments:

   • ADA Pay- an ADA payment system for businesses, Issued by COTI and allows merchants to accept ADA payments with instant settlement.
   • COTI is the official issuer of Djed - the first algorithmic stablecoin built on Cardano. It will use smart contracts to ensure price stability and maintain a base coin reserve, allowing users to use the stablecoin for DeFi transactions.

6. COTI developed the Crypto Volatility Index (CVI), a VIX for crypto. CVI allows users to hedge themselves against market volatility and impermanent loss.

   
   

   What is the future of COTI? For example, what new things to come, and what will it mean for the overall project?

   We plan to evolve our offering from payments to a fully-encompassing next-generation financial system, creating value for $COTI holders. What to expect:

• MultiDAG 2.0 - which can lead to a new token standard.

• Djed and its reserve coins.

• Leveraged volatility tokens.

• Impermanent loss protection for CVI users.

• More partnerships, growth opportunities, and a few more things worth waiting for.

  In addition, the fees from our ecosystem will be streamlined into the Treasury as rewards for our users.

  
  

  Tell us about your team. Who are the people behind COTI?

  I don’t want to gloat, but we have an amazing team at COTI. The COTI team includes engineers, mathematicians, economists, marketers, researchers, and veterans from the fintech and banking industries. For instance, Dr. Nir Haloani, COTI’s CTO, is the former co-founder and CTO of a company that IBM later acquired. We are growing rapidly, and our team is getting bigger.

  
  

  Which partnerships have you engaged so far, and which ones are the most impactful?

  We are fortunate to have some great partners. We have had a great relationship with Cardano over the last three years. Cardano ecosystem venture fund-cFund announced its first VC investment in COTI to accelerate integration and deepen the cooperation between COTI and Cardano. As mentioned earlier, some really impactful things we have done with Cardano are ADA Pay and Djed. Some other partnerships to highlight are the partnerships with, Chainlink, Simplex, Sundaeswap, Lovelace, Constellation, Ardana, and more.

  
  

  Thank you for your time! Do you have anything else to add?

  Thank you for inviting me to do this interview. The last thing I would like to add is that 2022 will be a huge year for COTI. We launched the Treasury to make COTI more decentralized and give our users more opportunities to earn money. We are also moving from a single coin infrastructure to a multi-coin infrastructure and launching the Djed stablecoin built on Cardano. This year, many big things are happening, so make sure you follow us to stay up to date.

  Website: https://coti.io

  Twitter: https://twitter.com/COTInetwork

  Telegram: https://t.me/COTInetwork

  
  

For the January edition of the Spotlight Article, we interviewed Robert Hever, COO / Co-Founder, and Damon Zwarich, CMO / Co-Founder from Charli3.

Hey Robert and Damon! Happy to connect today and learn more about the Charli3 project! Can you tell us more about the project and the problem you were addressing?

Charli3 is a decentralized oracle solution natively built in Haskell / on the PAB (Plutus Application Backend). We held our Initial DEX Offering in April 2021 and set out to solve the following three problems.

1. General oracle problem: Smart contract solutions need accurate, reliable, secure, and trusted off-chain data that fit their requirements (e.g., for speed). There is a need for aggregation of data to provide a trusted source to the chain (e.g., many single sources with conflicting values).

2. Cardano problem: There are no blockchain agnostic solutions. The current solutions are paired with network lag and high update fees. The barrier of entry to support launching Cardano projects is that the oracles must be built from scratch, natively with Haskell/Plutus code.

3. Decentralization problem: We see centralized oracle solutions, where one party is the governing authority on who gets what data and from where. We see centralization as part of the current financial system’s problem. We hope to solve that problem by being as “hands-off” as possible with our ecosystem solution.

What are the most important things about Charli3?

• From a team perspective: Most importantly, Charli3 is working towards our company vision, mission, and cultivating a culture that reflects our core values. It is critical that we internalize our core values and reflect them in our actions with the community and our partners.

• From a business perspective: Our specific role as a middleware solution to facilitate the transmission of data between off-chain providers and on-chain Dapp and Defi smart contract solutions comes with the responsibility of ensuring the integrity of the data these projects rely on as their lifeblood.

  Without question, Charli3 prides the accuracy, reliability, and security of the data flowing through our ecosystem as the single most important metric of success for our company.

  
  

  Going forward, how will Charli3 make an impact in the crypto space or on the world?

  Charli3’s team envisions a future of global smart contract adoption that uplifts and betters the world we live in; supporting this vision is of the utmost importance. We believe building on the Cardano infrastructure is the best way to support this vision.

  Dapps and Defi solutions will become available to people across the globe that never before had reliable access to such services in our current financial system. In that regard, supporting the launch and scaling of Cardano is incredibly important to our team.

  
  

  Now, what are your accomplishments so far, and what are you most proud of?

  The top two most important accomplishments are building our community and team.

• Community: Built and sustained a community of 12k token holders and 45k+ members on Twitter.

• Team: Scaled team from 3 members to 15+; International presence with diverse team members across 4 continents.

• Team success:

  • Contract-on-mainnet: One of the first projects to launch a functioning contract on the main net (9-13-2021, less than 24 hrs after 9-12-2021 hard fork).
  • MVP: The first version of our on-chain Oracle contract MVP completed.
  • Audit: Inaugural project to pass level 2 certification by CertiK through the IOHK certification program.

• Charity: Spearheaded a charitable campaign to pay for clean water sources in Africa through Grow Your Stake stake-pool and charity Drop4drop.

• Data consumers: 16 Cardano projects publicly announcing us as their preferred Oracle solution; 29 Total projects in conversations to be data consumers.

• CDA: Founding member of the Cardano DeFi Alliance.

Why should people choose to use Charli3? What are the advantages over your competitors?

• Competitors are healthy, especially Cardano native ones: Our vision entails multiple solutions, and competition pushes us to improve and innovate to create a better ecosystem; using multiple oracle solutions is prudent.
• Cardano-centric: Our team is working directly with the largest projects in the space, the governing bodies, and we are a founding member of the CDA (Cardano DeFi Alliance).
• Haskell / PAB native: Our solution is built Haskell native from the ground up to maximize Cardano’s benefits, reducing integration challenges and data lag. We see Charli3 as uniquely positioned to support the launch and scaling of the Cardano ecosystem, in particular the large community of Dapps and Defi solutions.
• Aim to provide world-class data providers on launch: As a double-sided marketplace, it is important we bring high-value data sources (as well as reputable node operators).
• Inclusivity and accessibility - Fund7 Proposal: If you aren’t aware, data consumption can be a barrier of entry for developing Dapp and DeFi solutions. As a company, we want to ensure that even the smaller and underfunded projects (especially those being made by entrepreneurs in developing countries) have the same opportunities to build solutions as everyone else. Through our Fund7 initiative, we aim to provide community feeds to get all projects off the ground.

What is the future of Charli3? For example, what new things to come, and what will it mean for the overall project?

• Onboard and launch: Initial data consumers, data providers, and node operators.
• Launch community feeds
• Maintain our feeds, heighten security: Ensure we meet KPIs (avoiding breaches, feed issues, etc.) and plan recurring audits.
• Improving UIUX: Make it easier for projects to use our ecosystem (automation and self-service is something we are actively exploring).
• R&D / innovation and increased security: We will look to any innovations to improve the security and accuracy of our data feeds. We’ve thrown around the idea of exploring complementary technology to improve value in our ecosystem, such as integrating machine learning into our pricing models or catching bad actors. However, nothing is planned, but our team sees technological innovation as critical to our future success.
• Migration from Cardano: In the future, we are looking for cross-chain interoperability and facilitating the migration of projects moving to Cardano.

Tell us about your team. Who are the people behind Charli3?

Our team is currently at 18+ members, and we are looking to double our team size in 2022.

• Leadership:

  • Damon: CMO and the usual voice of Charli3
  • Jonas: CTO
  • Robert: COO

• Development team

  • Our success is largely dependent on our global team of developers.
  • We also work with an incredible Haskell / functional programming lab that forms one of our key partnerships with our company.

• Community and Marketing

  • We have a team of community moderators, social managers, and graphical/ marketing support.
  • Graphics teams are working behind the scenes too.
  • Tech and marketing advisors for support.

Which partnerships have you engaged so far, and which ones are the most impactful?

• Grow your stake and the clean water coalition x Drop4Drop: As we spoke on this before, we have allocated time to creating a coalition of Cardano projects to aid in this humanitarian effort, supporting a cornerstone of the Cardano ethos.

• Data consumers: Approximately 29 projects are in line to launch data feeds with Charli3; Charli3 won’t succeed without their support.

• Cardstarter: An incubated accelerator that was instrumental in our IDO success. Without their partnership, we would not have raised our initial funding or grown our community to the point where we could have accomplished everything we’ve done to date.

• Cardano DeFi Alliance: as a founding partner of the alliance, we see this organization as one of our most impactful partnerships moving forward as we share values and a similar vision.

• IOHK: Although we are not officially partnered with the IOHK, their team from front-lines to the executive level has welcomed our team with open arms and supported us wholeheartedly. We are incredibly grateful for this relationship and see its impact growing parallel to our company’s growth.

  **IOHK is not an official partner of Charli3.

Thank you for your time, and best of luck!

For the December edition of the Spotlight article, we interviewed Josef from ADApools.

Hey Josef! Happy to connect today and learn more about the ADApools project! Can you tell us more about the founding of the project and the problem you were addressing?

Hi, thanks for the invitation! It started in the early days of ITN when there was no list of pools with their performance and no way to compare. I like to process open data. Such a tool was completely missing on the market. So it was such a logical evolution and fun. Over time, as Jormungandr added more data, ADApools eventually grew into a serious project. So the goal was to create a feature-rich comparison tool, which, looking at it today, has been achieved.

Could you please give us a rundown of the most important things about ADApools?

We've created the biggest and most popular pool comparison site, which is great! But ADApools has long been about more than just looking for a pool or checking how your pool stacks up against others. It's now a huge colossus, and the amount of features and tools go far beyond a list of pools. We have all sorts of on-chain data analysis, various APIs, callbacks, bots, graphs, an early-stage asset browser, a transaction browser with testnet support, and now the recently launched NFT explorer.

So going forth into 2021 and beyond, how will Cardano and ADApools make an impact in the crypto space, or on the world?

In any case, we want to continue supporting the Cardano ecosystem because it is a great project with an awesome future. It is important not to rest on our laurels and keep up with the development of the cryptocurrency world and Cardano itself. The only thing I would like to see is a fundamental change in Daedalus wallet - delegation center - pool sorting - not be the first one's 0% pools with a high stake. This leads to small pools being destroyed, especially when delegators see the potential rewards: 0.

Now, could you tell us about your accomplishments so far, and in the history of the project, please tell us what you are most proud of.

Of course, I'm most proud of the fact that we are by far the most significant pool explorers and help people every day to choose a pool to delegate or check where they are at. Doubly proud of the fact that although we didn't win catalyst funding, we found our own way of funding - currently, we have about 140 people supporting us through, Patreon for example, which is an incredible achievement and a sign of support from the community, it's just great!

Now, give us a quick rundown of the future of ADApools. For example, what new things are you seeking to bring to life, and what will it mean for the overall project?

There are a lot of those things at the moment. We want to extend ADApools.org to something like etherscan.io. We are considering launching POOLS tokens and doing funding for ADApools development. Cardanoassets.com with the advent of smart contracts, I could see something close to Coinmarketcap, focused on Cardano, I also have some more comprehensive API in mind, but we already have blockfrost.io from my great colleague Marek Mahut, so I guess there's no need.

Tell us about your team. Who're the people behind the screens?

ADApools belongs to the Cardanians.io group, with ADApools operating as an independent project. This means that we don't interfere with each other's work and work on projects independently. From Cardanians, Jaromir and I, Josef, are participating in the project. But we have a lot of other people who help us - I must mention Danny, who manages the groups and a lot of other contributors and translators.

Which partnerships have you engaged so far, and which ones are the most impactful?

We have many partnerships, and to be honest, I don't even keep track of them all anymore. I have to mention the great Yoroi wallet, where we provide data on pools, or adalite.io, which also works with our data. There are a lot of sites that more or less take our data and work with it somehow, which is great. Our server that hosts static files/ resources for public use-case gets a lot of traffic, so data/api is used quite intensively.

Thank you for your time! Do you have anything else to add?

Thank you, Kevin, for the interview. I would like to wish you and all readers a peaceful holiday and a happy new year on behalf of the whole team. I believe that next year will be even more interesting than this year; I'm looking forward to it.

For the November edition of the Developer Spotlight article, we will interview Alessandro, the creator of the Nami Wallet, co-founder of SpaceBudz, and Cardano stake pool operator.

Hey Alessandro! Happy to connect today and learn more about the Nami Wallet project! Can you tell us more about the project and what is the problem that you were addressing?

Hey, for sure! Nami is a browser-based wallet extension with a focus on simplicity and a great user experience. While Nami seems minimal at first glance, it’s very powerful since you can connect the wallet to any website and let the user interact with decentralized applications (dApps). The problem we try to tackle here with Nami is to interact with Cardano in a broader way and onboard users that may not have been in crypto long.

What are the most important things about Nami Wallet?

As described, Nami can interact with websites, which is crucial and differentiates Nami from existing wallets in the ecosystem. It allows for smart contract interaction, multi signatures, signing arbitrary complex transactions, and signing messages to prove ownership. While all of this sounds confusing and complicated, it is very easy to interact with these kinds of transactions from an end-user perspective.

Going forward, how will Nami Wallet make an impact in the crypto space or on the world?

Nami was inspired by MetaMask. Generally speaking, these kinds of wallets will have a huge impact on the crypto space because they interact with Web3 in the way they should be. Wallets are not seen as normal wallets anymore but rather as accounts that authorize certain actions on the blockchain. Do I think a browser extension is a way for real mass adoption? No, actually not, but it is a very good start and gives you a feeling for what is possible.

The idea is brilliant, but it needs to get deeper into the system, rather on OS or hardware level, to make it available for applications outside the browser and universally accessible on any device.

What are your accomplishments so far, and what are you most proud of?

The reason I created Nami was because of the SpaceBudz marketplace. After the sale of SpaceBudz back in March, I directly thought about building a decentralized marketplace. It is all about decentralization and user experience, so I quickly understood I need a wallet that can handle this kind of interaction to make it easy for the end-user and have everything in a non-custodial way. This is how Nami was born. It took me 6-8 months to integrate all parts and have a seamless interaction between the wallet and the marketplace. It all worked out. This is what I’m most proud of.

What is the future of Nami Wallet? For example, what new things to come, and what will it mean for the overall project?

There is a lot that can be done. We don’t have a clear roadmap, but we always prioritize important features. For example, building a web3 library to make the developer experience easier, improving smart contract support, and finding new innovative ways of doing things. We attract more developers and users by building these tools and features, which helps grow Cardano and inspires others to build.

Tell us about your team. Who are the people behind Nami Wallet?

Sure, we are two developers working on Nami. Pascal, the co-pool operator of Berry, jumped on board after I, Alessandro, created a proof of concept version of Nami that I worked on for two months straight.

Which partnerships have you engaged so far, and which ones are the most impactful?

We don’t have partnerships and are not actively looking because there is still so much that has to be improved, and we want to focus on having a solid core before we even consider partnerships. But we have one partnership with ADA Handle, which helps with improving the user experience by replacing addresses with handles and usernames.

Thank you for your time! Do you have anything else to add?

Thank you for having me on the spotlight article; it was a pleasure! I want to say thank you to the whole community for always appreciating our work and supporting us!

For the October edition of the Spotlight article, we interviewed Anthony, the CFO of Tokhun.

Hey Anthony! Happy to connect today and learn more about the Tokhun project! Can you tell us more about the project and what is the problem that you were addressing?

Tokhun is a smart contract-driven NFT platform built on the Cardano blockchain. When creating Tokhun, we wanted to provide CNFT artists with a space to create, display, and sell their artwork.

What are the most important things about Tokhun?

Our community. The ability to provide a foundation to our members, enabling them to establish their own line of work within Cardano. We like to consider ourselves more of an onboarding tool into Cardano for artists and businesses alike, not just an NFT marketplace.

Going forward, how will Tokhun make an impact in the crypto space or on the world?

Continual improvement is the key. We hope that Tokhun will be used as a tool to onboard new users and businesses into Cardano. Through UI/UX development Tokhun strives to provide an interactive and fun experience for the user. We believe a tool like Tokhun has the potential to transform the way individuals and businesses will interact with the Cardano blockchain.

Now, what are your accomplishments so far, and what are you most proud of?

We are proud of the team; this is a hard-working group. We all love what we do, and it shows. A wise man once told me, it is not considered work if you love what you do. I believe this is genuinely relatable.

Our most significant milestone so far would be smart contracts. We are finally able to say it! After many months of development, we have embedded smart contracts into Tokhun. We will be launching SCs on Tokhun main net Wednesday, 10/27. It is still limited in terms of functionality, but the Tokhun team is working hard to add more features ASAP.

Why should people choose to use Tokhun? What are the advantages?

Tokhun is designed for the user. Therefore, we try to create an enriched environment where even novice users can navigate and immerse themselves in the world of CNFTs.

With recent updates to the site Buy Now, orders are processed instantly. Before smart contracts, processing time was around 15 minutes or less. Other platforms can take up to 24 hours, and there is always the risk that the buyer may never receive the NFT. This unfortunate situation is rectified on the Tokhun platform, and buyers will always receive the NFT they purchase.

What is the future of Tokhun? For example, what new things to come, and what will it mean for the overall project?

We currently have a few projects underway that we are pretty excited about.

• Our new Tokhun platform utility tokens, known as TOKHUNZ. That's a whole lot of tokens. We tried to keep it simple.

• The team has just spun up our first stake pool. Users can stake their Ada and receive TOKHUNZ (Tokhuns native currency) along with their Ada rewards. In addition, we will accept TOKHUNZ to mint and buy NFTs on the platform. Users will also be able to stake TOKHUNZ by providing a trading pair and staking the assets to a liquidity pool through one of our DEX partners.

• The team has started a community outreach. We want to engage with our users and hear what they have to say. Some of Tokhun’s best features were requests of our users, so we take every customer recommendation into serious consideration. Join us on Twitter Spaces every Friday at 9 am EST. Where we give out weekly status updates and interact with the community.

• We are diving into the commercial side of NFTs, working with a few luxury goods manufacturers to provide NFT certificates of authenticity, mitigating the risk of counterfeits.

• Implementation of NFT auctions: Before introducing auctions to the site, the only way to purchase an NFT was with the Buy It Now feature. Tokhun has just released our auction feature, allowing the market to determine an NFTs value while allowing the seller to set a reserve price, bid increments, duration, along with many other variables.

• NFT bluebook: We are taking past data from various policy IDs and past sales to generate an appraisal tool that will help users assess the value of their NFT.

• Tokhun’s Virtual gallery: We are working on a virtual gallery that will allow users to display their artwork in an interactive virtual gallery. The users will have the ability to invite guests, and host live virtual exhibits and auctions.

Tell us about your team. Who are the people behind Tokhun?

• Latheesan is our CTO and founder of Tokhun. He deals with the internal development of the site and technical relations.
• Valentin is our CEO. He started Tokhun with Lath. He deals with the UI/UX & high-level overview.
• Adam is our Chief Engineer and technical consultant.
• I (Anthony) am the CFO and deal with business relations and partnerships.
• Chris is the head of PR.
• Siddik customer support and backend dev.
• Kyle, our SPO (stake pool operator)

Click here to learn more about the team.

Which partnerships have you engaged so far, and which ones are the most impactful?

Tokhun is still in its infancy, so we have not established many partnerships just yet. However, we have a few in the pipeline that we are excited to announce when the deals are closed and the timing is right.

Thank you for your time! Do you have anything else to add?

Whether you are an artist, new to Cardano NFTs, or an expert collector, we invite you to come check out Tokhun.io

We’re going for #1

For the September edition of the Developer Spotlight article, we will interview Kate, the senior marketing manager at NOWPayments.

Hey Kate! Happy to connect today and learn more about the NOWPayments project! Can you tell us more about the project and what is the problem that you were addressing?

Hi, happy to answer your questions!

NOWPayments was founded in 2019 by the team behind ChangeNOW, a leading crypto exchange service. NOWPayments remains close partners with ChangeNOW but is fully independent and has its own team.

The idea of NOWPayments was to help spread mass adoption by making it easy to use crypto daily. The challenges merchants face when deciding if they should accept crypto are:

• Volatility.
• Lack of knowledge about crypto basics.
• Lack of means to accept on popular e-commerce platforms.
• The need to withdraw to fiat.

We try to help solve each of these by offering a fixed-rate option and supporting conversion to stablecoins. In addition, we continue developing plugins that can be integrated with major e-commerce platforms. We also have a fiat conversion option, although we hope it won’t be needed in the future if everyone can use crypto everywhere. That is why we are targeting all industries: e-commerce, services, traveling, gaming, tech, etc. Crypto is ubiquitous.

What are the most important things about NOWPayments?

With pleasure!

One of the most important things is that we are a crypto-to-crypto payment gateway with a fiat conversion. True mass adoption is about accepting and using crypto! Anyone can accept Cardano payments anywhere, and we hope that the merchants will hodl and use ada in the future.

NOWPayments is non-custodial, so merchants receive ada in their wallets and are in full control. We do have a fiat conversion option, but we focus on crypto-to-crypto payment, as that’s where true adoption lies.

We pride ourselves on our auto coin exchange feature. That means we process the exchanges ourselves without using third-party exchanges. So even if customers pay with some other crypto, merchants can still accept ada.

Lastly, payments and donations are not the only use cases we contribute to the Cardano ecosystem. For example, we also support mass payments, enabling an ada-powered payroll for companies.

Going forward, how will NOWPayments make an impact in the crypto space or on the world?

We have many ambitions and plans to make crypto even easier to use and as widespread as possible. Here are some of the things we are going to implement soon.

Subscriptions: Selling subscriptions for crypto is a very popular in-demand feature, and we have developed a way to do this.

New e-commerce plugins: Recently, we have released a new Shopware plugin, but we “never stop, never stopping.” Our plans include Ecwid, Bigcommerce, and many other plugins. We research which e-commerce platforms are popular and in-demand and start working on new plugins to help crypto payments become widespread.

PoS solutions: We are helping offline stores explore the benefits of crypto payments. Besides developing ways to integrate with current PoS systems, we are working on an invoices system that merchants can use for their brick-and-mortar stores.

Mass payments: We plan on making our mass payments feature even more user-friendly so that it won’t be even a question of whether to use it, but when to use it. People will be able to create mass payments requests right in their NOWPayments account so that the whole process is swift and there are no additional steps.

Donations: We have created a way to make a customized donation link right in your account. We are going to perfect that. We are also working on a charity project - featuring charity projects with a donation button underneath them to make it easy to donate. A recent charity project we have partnered with is Elongate. We also have partnered with CoinSocialStory to create a page that would feature charities and an easy way to donate to them. There you can find a way to donate to the Rainforest Foundation.

More coins: We are adding new and exciting cryptocurrencies every month. Stay tuned and accept any crypto you like!

What are your accomplishments so far, and what are you most proud of?

Two years, and we have 95+ cryptocurrencies, eight plugins, 3 APIs, several donation solutions, thousands of partners, and incredible friendships in the crypto space.

Why should people choose to use NOWPayments? What are the advantages?

• One of our key advantages is auto coin conversion, meaning you don’t have to have multiple wallets for different currencies. Instead, we can auto convert any currency into the ones you want to accept.
• Pricing is always 0,5% per transaction and 0,5% per exchange if needed.
• New coins are added every month.
• Personal account manager.
• Always ready to customize.

What is the future of NOWPayments? For example, what new things to come, and what will it mean for the overall project?

The future is bright with possibilities. Our vision of the perfect future is that every store, offline or online, accepts crypto with ease and pays their employee’s salaries in crypto. As a result, they can use it globally and spend it on everything they want. NOWPayments will be proud to have played a role in making that happen.

Tell us about your team. Who are the people behind NOWPayments?

Many amazing people are working at NOWPayments and making the dream of Mass Adoption come true. Here are some of them. Xena Kash is our CEO, Maria Key and Yana Mar are our business developers, and I Kate am our senior marketing manager.

Which partnerships have you engaged so far, and which ones are the most impactful?

Hundreds of new partners sign up with us every month to start accepting crypto. Some notable partnerships include Travala, a booking service, and Elongate, a crypto charity project. These two represent two of the most important use cases for crypto: payments and donations.

Thank you for your time! Do you have anything else to add?

Thank you for this amazing opportunity! We are thrilled to contribute to the Cardano ecosystem by bringing in more use cases for ada. If there is anything you think we can make easier in terms of payments or donations, please let us know!

For the August edition of the Developer Spotlight article, we will interview Adam Dean, the primary developer of Mercury for WooCommerce.

Hey Adam! Happy to connect today and learn more about the Mercury for WooCommerce project! Can you tell us more about the project and what is the problem that you were addressing?

With Cardano Mercury for WooCommerce, my goal was to make a simple and accessible solution to bridge traditional e-commerce with the Cardano Blockchain. WooCommerce is one of the largest open-source e-commerce platforms in the industry. So it was only natural to create a similarly open-source, fee-free payment gateway to bridge Cardano to WooCommerce. One of the most significant barriers to entry in the cryptocurrency industry is the need to trade back and forth between fiat and crypto. Mercury aims to eliminate that friction point by allowing merchants and shoppers to transact directly with one another with the currency of the future.

What are the most important things about Mercury for WooCommerce?

Probably the most important point about Mercury for WooCommerce is that there are zero fees, zero accounts required, and zero tracking. When developing Mercury, the goal was not to profit but to help drive adoption and utilize the blockchain to connect customers directly to vendors. The software is relatively simple and easily auditable. It aims to use free or low-cost APIs (including the amazing Blockfrost Cardano API by Five Binaries) and services** to minimize the financial impact to vendors.

Going forward, how will Mercury make an impact in the crypto space or on the world?

I hope that Mercury will open the door to much larger, mainstream adoption of Cardano (and cryptocurrencies in general) through normalization. For example, suppose we can normalize the usage and transact cryptocurrencies as currency rather than simply a store of wealth mechanism. In that case, we can drive greater adoption by making safe, secure, and auditable transaction history available to vendors and shoppers worldwide.

What are your accomplishments so far, and what are you most proud of?

To date, I’m most proud of having been able to release and open source the code for Mercury via GitHub to the Cardano and WooCommerce community without the need for funding and simply working in my spare time. Of course, there are many features and improvements I’m eager to make to the code and looking forward to ongoing development for the foreseeable future.

Why should people choose to use Mercury? What are the advantages over its competitors?

To be honest, there are no true competitors to Mercury that I’m aware of at this time. No Middle Man for WooCommerce is another open-source plugin that offers a host of cryptocurrency options without fees or middlemen. However, the Cardano integration for No Middle Man has not been updated since the Byron era. I view No Middle Man as a spiritual predecessor of Mercury and thank the contributors of that project for their open-source work. I believe that people should choose their financial freedom, which is why merchants should decide to use Mercury. With no fees and no hassle, it’s a no-brainer for merchants to choose to accept Cardano (ada) payments on their website quickly and easily and thereby enable the financial freedom of their customers.

Tell us about your team. Who are the people behind Mercury?

I am the primary developer of Mercury for WooCommerce. I have been a Cardano stake pool owner/operator since the ITN (Ticker: BUFFY) and have always strived to support the Cardano community in every way possible. This includes countless hours spent helping fellow SPOs in public and private Telegram chats, development, and contribution to community tools including simpleLiveView/CNTools gLiveView, Python Slot Leader Log script, Leader Logs Sigma API, development of the first Cardano on-chain voting mechanism (utilizing transaction metadata), and most recently Cardano Mercury for WooCommerce.

The testing and development of Mercury for WooCommerce would not have been possible without the feedback, brainstorming, and testing contributions of Kyle Solomon (Adosia IoT, Heidrun, spacecoins, FROG stake pool) and Latheesan Kanesamoorthy (primary developer and co-founder of Tokhun.io, Heidrun contributor).

Special thanks to JP Birch (MADinArt) for his help developing the Mercury logos and branding and Marek Mahut and the team at Five Binaries for the amazing Blockfrost API, which has helped make Cardano integrations like Mercury a painless and straightforward process.

Which partnerships have you engaged so far, and which ones are the most impactful?

The most impactful partnership to date has been with Crypto Swag, the first e-commerce merchant to implement Mercury into their website. It’s one thing to test things in a testnet environment and a completely different level when you officially “go live.” I have discussed implementing Mercury with several other WooCommerce small business owners and website developers and am excited to increase the use of Mercury as time goes on hopefully.

Thank you for your time! Do you have anything else to add?

I’d like to add my thanks to the entire Cardano Community; keep being awesome. And thanks to the Cardano Developer Portal for choosing Mercury as a featured project!

** Mercury currently requires at least a Blockfrost Free-Tier API key as well as a free or paid Currency Converter API key if the storefront is using a currency other than U.S. Dollars (USD).

Dear Cardano community,

To celebrate the Cardano Developer Portal launch, The Cardano Foundation minted the world’s first Non-Fungible Tokens of Appreciation (NFTAs). NFTAs are NFTs showing appreciation to the ten developers that provided feedback and helped build the developer portal. Think of them as “certificates of participation” when you attend a seminar or an event that they give out to attendees. Only they are digital!

In addition, to show our appreciation, we rewarded the community members with Bronze Tokens of Appreciation. Bronze Tokens are a way to give the NFTAs extra utility over their collectability. Tokens can be redeemed once to highlight a topic or project on the Cardano Developer Portal. For example, it can spotlight a project they are working on or inform the Cardano community of a specific topic. The spotlight articles can be found at the Cardano Developer Portal Blog.

The minting strategy

The Cardano Foundation’s goal was to remain neutral when it came down to deciding the standard to mint the NFTAs. We are in the same ‘playground’ and learn with the community about what standards work to what end. The NFT Standard we chose was CIP 721. We chose this because it was the most complete minting proposal at the time of the campaign launch. But we don’t necessarily endorse it as the standard. We encourage new proposals to be submitted using the Cardano Improvement Proposal framework, and we will continue to learn and build with you, the community.

The CIP 721 Metadata Standard authors are Alessandro Konrad, the creator of Spacebudz, and Smaug, the creator of Pool.pm. They propose to create a framework to attach metadata to a token. Metadata is important because it describes and gives information about the token. Since tokens on Cardano are native, the link from the token to the metadata needed to be established differently from Ethereum, which creates the link using smart contracts. For Cardano to make the link unique, CIP 721 suggests that the metadata should be attached to the transaction where the token was created.

To read more about CIP 721 and the NFT Metadata Standard, click here. To view all Cardano Improvement Proposals (CIPs), click here.

How we minted the NFTAs

Tokens that are built on Cardano are native. Unlike Ethereum’s ERC-20 tokens, Cardano doesn’t require a smart contract. Instead, the tokens are treated like Cardano’s native token, ADA. Using native tokens, you can create a variety of digital assets like Non-Fungible-Tokens representing art or appreciation. Learn more about this here.

To make sure the NFTAs came from the Cardano Foundation, a policyId identifies them. You can check out more information about the NFTAs and the policyId at the Cardano Foundation NFTA Official Page. In addition, they are attached with metadata that describes the details of the transaction and ownership address.

To mint the NFT’s, we first used a Cardano Foundation wallet to create a transaction to mint the tokens containing the metadata. Second, the ten developers sent us a receiving wallet address to receive the token. Third, another transaction to send the token to their wallet. Finally, to verify the work, each NFTA has a QR code that will navigate to the Cardano Blockchain Explorer for anyone to view and verify the transactions, including the Bronze Developer Portal Token issuance. Thus, no matter how much time goes by, the blockchain will have an immutable record to show that the community members received the first Non-Fungible Token of Appreciation.

At the time of writing this article, two NFTs have not been minted. We are waiting on two developers to provide their wallet addresses. Also, the Cardano Explorer is not showing the transactions correctly when you try to scan the QR code on the NFTAs. If you are interested in learning more or mint native assets or NFTs, visit the Cardano Developer Portal.

For the July edition of the Spotlight article, we interviewed one of the creators of NFT-MAKER, Patrick Tobler.

Hey Patrick! Happy to connect today and learn more about the NFT-MAKER project! Can you tell us how the project started and what is the problem that you were addressing?

Hey! Thank you for having me - it’s an honor.
Back then, when Native Tokens first arrived, and Spacebudz introduced the concept of NFTs to Cardano, I quickly realized that there is no simple way for non-technical people to create their own NFTs on Cardano. So I decided to partner up with Fahim, our designer, and together we built the first version of nft-maker.io. Our goal was to focus on the User Experience and make the NFT creation flow as easy and accessible as possible.

What are the most important things about NFT-MAKER?

The main feature of the current version of the NFT-MAKER is uploading your images and creating NFTs in 3 simple steps. Once these steps are completed, the NFT is automatically being sent to your wallet. This whole process of going from an image to an NFT usually takes less than 2 minutes.

Going forward, how will NFT-MAKER make an impact in the crypto space or on the world?

Now that I’ve graduated from university, I will be working full-time on bringing the next version of the NFT-MAKER to life. For this purpose, we’ve started a company here in Germany called yellow house GmbH.

Our mission for the future of the NFT-MAKER is very clear: We want to make NFTs accessible to everyone.

For this purpose, we’re building multiple applications that will allow everyone to easily create, sell, trade & buy NFTs on Cardano. The main focus for this will be Version 2 of the NFT-MAKER, which will be a decentralized NFT marketplace.

We will be pushing the boundaries of what NFTs can be by making access to them more accessible, better, and cheaper.

What are your accomplishments so far, and what are you most proud of?

One statistic that I recently learned about makes me particularly proud is the following:

The NFT-MAKER is directly responsible for over ⅓ of all Token policies on Cardano.* Of course, this does not mean that we’ve minted the most NFTs or Tokens on Cardano but what it does mean is that the NFT-MAKER is currently the Cardano application with the most individual users (excluding wallets).

This makes me so proud because it shows that our approach of putting the user first and lowering the entry barriers is working. So many users' first “real” interaction with a dApp on Cardano was through the NFT-MAKER.

Why should people choose to use NFT-MAKER? What are the advantages?

To this date, there is no easier way to create NFTs on Cardano. We’re committed to improving this experience even further and building the most accessible decentralized NFT marketplace, not only on Cardano but in the whole crypto space.

What is the future of NFT-MAKER? For example, what new things to come, and what will it mean for the overall project?

Besides the previously mentioned decentralized NFT marketplace, we’re working hard on a tool we call NFT-MAKER PRO. This tool will allow professional users to utilize our backend services for their projects easily. Furthermore, by simply accessing our services, everyone will be able to build their large-scale NFT projects, marketplaces, or applications. The idea here is to become the backbone for many dApps and make the integration of NFTs as easy as possible.

Tell us about your team. Who are the people behind NFT-MAKER?

Our team consists of three people: Fahim, Peter and myself (Patrick). We all met during high school and have quickly become close friends. Ever since it has been our goal to start a company and work on awesome projects together, now, this is finally becoming a reality!

Fahim is our designer, so everything you see on our website or social media was somehow touched by him. He specializes in UI/UX design and has a passion for making music in his free time.

Peter describes himself as the person between User Experience and Technology. He has a strong programming and hardware background but is also excellent at optimizing the product and making it easily accessible.

And lastly, I, Patrick, am responsible for everything that has to do with the actual technology behind the NFT-MAKER. As a recent Computer Science graduate and Cardano Stake Pool Operator, I have a strong background in the technical aspects of Cardano. I’ve been in the Cardano space since 2017 and have even written my bachelor thesis about building a dApp on Cardano.

Which partnerships have you engaged so far, and which ones are the most impactful?

We’ve been in talks with many amazing projects, companies, and potential partners. Most of which we can not yet speak about because of various Non-Disclosure Agreements. But great things are coming to NFT-MAKER and Cardano!

Two of the most meaningful publicly announced partnerships have been with The Hoskinsons** & unsigned_algorithms NFT projects. Both of these projects have brought a lot of innovation and new ideas to the Cardano ecosystem and have set new standards for the world of NFTs. We’re incredibly proud that they’ve both used our NFT-MAKER PRO services to mint & sell their NFTs. By working with them, we were able to build, improve and test our PRO services in a controlled environment, and it is fair to say that NFT-MAKER PRO would not exist without them.

Thank you for your time! Do you have anything else to add?

Thank you for having me! Just thinking about what Cardano has allowed me and many others to accomplish in such a short time makes me unbelievably grateful. This space & community is changing the world every single day. For this, I just want to thank every single person who participates in the Cardano ecosystem in some way.

*It is NFT-MAKER’s claim that as of the time writing this article that NFT-MAKER is directly responsible for over ⅓ of all Token policies on Cardano.

**The Hoskinson’s is a collection of unique, limited-edition NFT trading cards commemorating the Cardano platform.

Dear Cardano community,

It’s finally here! We’re proud to announce the launch of the Cardano Developer Portal. A one stop library featuring, on launch, over fifty articles, vetted by you, the community.

Ready for your thoughts, comments, builds, additions!

Topics covered in the Portal

We’ve been helped tremendously by various people in the Cardano community. Their builds, feedback, comments and in some cases complete articles have been immensely helpful. Our gratitude is great, as is our respect for what you keep bringing to the community!

We’re confident the portal now has a very solid basis, covering everything currently possible on the Cardano mainnet. Whether you want to implement transaction metadata, mint native tokens, integrate Cardano, operate a stake pool or get your project funded: there’s something for pretty much everyone.

All this, just a few months before the Alonzo hard fork!

World’s First NFTAs

To celebrate the launch, we minted the world’s first NFTAs: 10 Non-Fungible Tokens of Appreciation.

Each of the NFTAs consists of a thumbs-up photo of a Cardano community member approving the Portal. These double as campaign visuals the Foundation uses to promote the portal across the web – while ownership of these campaign assets is transferred to the community members. Scanning the QR code on these NFTAs leads one to the Cardano blockchain explorer, where the transferred ownership can be verified by anyone anywhere.

What sets these apart even further is that each NFTA is accompanied by a token representing a non-transferable, one time opportunity for a receiver of that NFTA to highlight a topic or project of their choosing on the Cardano Developer portal. We call these Bronze tokens of appreciation.

Click here to view full list of NFTAs.

Dear Community, good things come to those who wait. We know it took a while, but we sincerely hope it will be worth the wait. We’re looking forward to your contributions, constructive criticisms and, hopefully, thumbs-ups as we keep building towards the social and financial infrastructure of the future with you.

1. Cardano on the Rocks​

Cardano on the Rocks is a free educational project by CLIO1, which teaches users to build a Cardano node on a Rock Pi microcomputer.

Cardano on the Rocks describes the variety of hardware options you can choose from, all the way to how you can install and configure your stake pool on your Rock Pi computer. There are even instructions on how to 3D-print your very own case, pictured above, for your Rock Pi node!

It’s a particularly interesting project for those who care about energy usage and requirements, as RockPi units only use up to 18 watts of power, as opposed to ASICs miners used in PoW blockchains that reach many hundreds of watts of power usage. Thank you, Markus Gufler, for your contributions!

2. JorManager​

JorManager is an indispensable node-monitoring tool built by community member Andrew Westberg. Available through Bitbucket, JorManager provides tools and components for tracking stake pool performance, modifying pool fees, editing pool metadata, creating nodes, and more.

If you’re a new stake pool operator and you want a command center to help manage your pool, then JorManager is a fantastic resource. You’ll find everything you need to get started here. You could even use these stake pool tools to manage your newly created RockPi pool!

Thank you Andrew Westberg, your resources help our stake pool operator community work efficiently. Keep building!

The Cardano Developer Spotlight​

Each month, the Cardano Foundation will be selecting a couple of interesting community-led projects to discover and share with our wider ecosystem. We hope this will encourage those who are already building solutions on Cardano to keep moving forward, while also helping to inspire those thinking of building on Cardano to get started and collaborate.

If you want to draw attention to a project, please introduce it in the developer forums under "Cardano Projects".

1. ADA MakerSpace​

ADA MakerSpace is a YouTube channel dedicated to tutorials and workshops on developer components available on Cardano. Dedicated to Marlowe, Cardano’s domain specific language for writing financial smart contracts, the ADA MakerSpace channel features carefully curated content for developers.

With almost 9 hours of tutorials and walkthroughs available to watch on the ADA MakerSpace YouTube channel, it provides a very comprehensive overview of the Marlowe Playground and its associated components.

It’s a great resource for anyone looking to get started learning about Marlowe, Plutus, Haskell, or smart contracts on Cardano, so check it out if that interests you! Thank you BooneBergsma for your contributions!

2. Hitchhiker's Guides​

The Hitchhiker’s Guides are a series of ‘gists’—GitHub-based tutorials and developer notes— from our long-time community member Pal Dorogi. A goldmine of information on using Cardano developer tools and documentation, Pal’s gists are a great resource for both beginners and more experienced developers.

You can find out how to perform Shelley cold key generation, learn about staking, explore Plutus Playground content, and explore Byron-era recovery information through Pal’s gists.

It’s a great example of community participation and contribution, which we are really looking to increase ahead of the Mary hard fork! Check out Pal’s gists here, or follow him on the Cardano Forum. Thank you _ilap, it is clear you have devoted much time to these guides. Keep building!

The Cardano Developer Spotlight​

Each month, the Cardano Foundation will be selecting a couple of interesting community-led projects to discover and share with our wider ecosystem. We hope this will encourage those who are already building solutions on Cardano to keep moving forward, while also helping to inspire those thinking of building on Cardano to get started and collaborate.

If you want to draw attention to a project, please introduce it in the developer forums under "Cardano Projects".

1. ADATools.io - Cardano Holograms​

In the spotlight this month is ADATools.io, and specifically its Cardano Network Hologram feature. ADATools.io is a website and pool explorer dedicated to tracking and aggregating staking and delegation data, blocks and transactions, and providing staking calculators for Cardano users.

ADATools.io has a very interesting feature that we think really helps visualize where Cardano stake pools are located across the globe. Called the ‘Network Hologram’, ADATool’s interactive 3D holo-globe lets users explore pool locations and sizes, as well as showing the number of active pools and relays worldwide.

If you are looking for an easy way to explore and visualize data on the Cardano blockchain, then ADATools.io is a good place to start. Thank you, ADATools.io for your efforts, keep building!

2. Pool.pm​

The next on our radar this month is Pool.pm, a fun way to visualize transactions happening on the Cardano blockchain in real-time. Pool.pm uses images of dolphins, whales, and sharks to show how large transactions are, with the largest on-chain transactions represented as humpback whales.

Pool.pm, also shows movements to and from public stake pools alongside pool tickers, as well as transactions from major Cardano ecosystem entities.

For developers and interested parties who want to track flows of ada (₳) in real-time, Pool.pm is a great resource. Thank you, Pool.pm for your efforts, keep building!

You can follow Pool.pm on Twitter here.

The Cardano Developer Spotlight​

Each month, the Cardano Foundation will be selecting a couple of interesting community-led projects to discover and share with our wider ecosystem. We hope this will encourage those who are already building solutions on Cardano to keep moving forward, while also helping to inspire those thinking of building on Cardano to get started and collaborate.

If you want to draw attention to a project, please introduce it in the developer forums under "Cardano Projects".

1. Cardanoscan.io​

Cardanoscan.io is both a block explorer and pool tracking tool, built and operated by Cardano community member Ashish Prajapati. Cardano Scan easily lets users view recent transactions on the Cardano blockchain, explore recent blocks, and discover insightful metrics, such as the total number of active stake pools, and the total amount of ada staked on the network.

One feature that particularly stands out about Cardano Scan is the transaction visualization, which shows a graph of transactions from the last 15 days, or three epochs.

If you would like an easy and feature-rich way to explore the Cardano blockchain, then Cardano Scan is definitely worth checking out. Thank you, Cardano Scan for your efforts, keep building!

Follow Cardanoscan.io on Twitter.

2. PoolTool.io​

Similar to CardanoScan.io, PoolTool.io is a Cardano block explorer, albeit with some unique features and visualizations that make it a very interesting tool to explore.

The ‘Network Health’ section of PoolTool.io contains several useful charts and trackers which present easy-to-digest information on metrics such as community produced blocks, pool propagation times, historical block height alignment, and more.

Those monitoring the Cardano network are sure to find PoolTool.io useful, so check them out if you haven’t already. Thank you for your efforts PoolTool.io, and keep on building!

You can follow PoolTool.io on Twitter here.

The Cardano Developer Spotlight​

Each month, the Cardano Foundation will be selecting a couple of interesting community-led projects to discover and share with our wider ecosystem. We hope this will encourage those who are already building solutions on Cardano to keep moving forward, while also helping to inspire those thinking of building on Cardano to get started and collaborate.

If you want to draw attention to a project, please introduce it in the developer forums under "Cardano Projects".